Any X470 Gaming 7 owners around? This board seems to be total junk: beware.

[dcominottim]

Guys,

I really need some help to confirm whether this board causes all the several issues I'm having. It has been nothing but trouble at STOCK settings since I've bought it, and it's COUNTLESS MILES behind my 5y old G1 Sniper M3 Z77 from Gigabyte. This board looks like a slightly sophisticated brick in comparison.

1. Pure UEFI mode (CSM set to Disabled) is totally broken for me, at least with a Zotac GTX 1060 6GB Mini. If CSM is set to Disabled, the board SOFT BRICKS and can never finish POST again unless the DualBIOS recovery procedure is used. It doesn't even output video or light up the keyboard.
2. The implementation of the Intel l211 NIC seems broken either in firmware/BIOS or hardware. TCP Checksum Offload is 100% broken (cannot be enabled at all) both in Windows 10 and Linux, and other features such as Receive-Side Scaling on Windows seem to depend on it.
3. They removed something as BASIC as SATA AHCI hot-plug and individual drive control, meaning I can't individually enable/disable drives in BIOS. Windows and several Linux distros get totally confused when they detect more than 1 ESP and install their bootloader to the 1st one they find.

Regarding #2, please see https://communities.intel.com/message/547276#547276 and help me test if you can't enable TCP Checksum Offload at all? If the NIC is broken, I'm going to return this PITA and get anything else from ASUS or I don't know.

Gigabyte's support has been totally useless and deceptive regarding my reporting of all these issues, both in their official issue tracker and other places. I was able to reach out to Matthew on Reddit, but he said he'd check it out and then totally disappeared and ignored further communications. Worst support I've ever received.

 

[UsandThem]

This statement is just my own personal feelings on them, so take it with a grain of salt, and not as the gospel truth.

I don't have experience with your particular board, but I had a similar issue with a Z170 board they ruined by their BIOS team. Prior to this I had held Gigabyte it high regards, and used many of their boards over 20 years. Things have changed for the worse with them IMHO, so I finally got fed up enough and replaced it with an Asrock board that has been rock solid. When it came time to build my son a Ryzen system, I again went with an $80 X370 Asrock board. Absolutely no issues at all.

Their support forums are filled with very angry customers. Do yourself a favor, return the board, and buy one from a different manufacturer. Gigabyte isn't what they used to be......

 

[XavierMace]

Their support forums are filled with very angry customers. Do yourself a favor, return the board, and buy one from a different manufacturer. Gigabyte isn't what they used to be......

None of the manufacturers are. I've seen Asus do just as bad or worse. You can see my complains about Asrock's Raven Ridge BIOS fiasco in several threads on this forum. Unfortunately that's simply the way things are going these days. Personally I don't even bother trying to reach out to support. If I can't get it working off the bat, I just RMA it. They're not paying me to be their QA.

 

[dcominottim]

None of the manufacturers are. I've seen Asus do just as bad or worse. You can see my complains about Asrock's Raven Ridge BIOS fiasco in several threads on this forum. Unfortunately that's simply the way things are going these days. Personally I don't even bother trying to reach out to support. If I can't get it working off the bat, I just RMA it. They're not paying me to be their QA.

I am more or less of the same opinion nowadays. It's unfortunate how QA has gone totally downhill in the last few years. Well, I'm thinking of swapping this one for an ASUS Crosshair Hero VII. I only accept mobos with dual BIOS or BIOS Flashback. Have saved me from RMA'ing countless times.

 

[EXCellR8]

I don't think I've had a BIOS flash fail since LGA 775, so I don't typically care if there is dual BIOS on a board. If I somehow mess it up that's on me, but it's much more forgiving nowadays anyway.

I don't buy a ton of motherboards anymore but I haven't picked up on any particular QA trends that are worthy of noting. Everything is manufactured in China and Taiwan anyway so it's basically the same thing across the board. It wouldn't surprise me if Gigabyte was actually just a back room at ASUS or if MSI was across the street from ASRock and their employees go to lunch together and have a laugh at all of the support requests that they've gotten. Sure, different fronts can sport different practices and standards but actual physical differences are actually quite negligible.

 

[Charlie22911]

None of the manufacturers are. I've seen Asus do just as bad or worse. You can see my complains about Asrock's Raven Ridge BIOS fiasco in several threads on this forum. Unfortunately that's simply the way things are going these days. Personally I don't even bother trying to reach out to support. If I can't get it working off the bat, I just RMA it. They're not paying me to be their QA.

My experience mirrors this; In the last couple years I've built multiple machines around MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS, and ASRock.
Every single board had some strange quirk, with one (and its RMA replacement!) killing several CPUs due to some BIOS issue. In fact, all of my worst experiences have been on recently released boards.

So far though I have had the best experience with ASRock (X299 TaiChi, x399 Taichi, budget 270 board, and budget AM4 build).
For the foreseeable future I will be using ASRock in my builds until something changes in the manufacturer landscape again (which it will).